The subtitle of this book, “Public
Discourse in the Age of Show Business” is an effective summary of his
book. He begins with a discussion of the how a culture’s main
medium of expression confines how public discourse will occur. To
lay groundwork for the contrast of the current age, he outlines the
great importance of the printed word, yesterday’s medium of expression,
in early America. He quickly follows the transition to the
present, where he analyses several telling elements of modern culture,
ending with Aldus Huxley’s warning that it might not be a 1984
thought-control society that is as dangerous as a society where no ones
cares to have thoughts at all because they are not as entertaining.

The premise of Amusing Ourselves to
Death is that a culture, in particular, public discussion, is
defined by its main medium of expression. Postman appears to
delineate history into three time periods, each with a different
medium. The first, and longest, is the oral culture. This
period is distinguished by its epic poetry as a form of story-telling
and by the use of proverbs to preserve wisdom; court justice in
an oral society is likely to be rendered in the form of a proverb (when
debating the Pharisees over the issue of taxes, Jesus did not pore over
books of law, but gave his decision with the proverb “Render unto
Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”). The second
period is the written culture, brought about by the printing
press. In this society the written word is king; if it is
not written, it does not carry weight because spoken words are
ephemeral. And because the written word lends itself to rational
discussion, the society becomes a rational society (witness the
Enlightenment growing out of the availability of the printed
word). The third society, is ours, the age of images, the
implications of which are discussed at length.

In order to highlight the contrast between the latter two ages, he
discusses the printed word’s effect on early America. The process
of reading requires the reader to expend effort to understand the
writer and determine if the writer is saying something they agree
with. Furthermore, the process of writing inherently lends itself
to the creation of rational works. Since early America was an
avid reader, it is little suprise that they listened to seven hours of
debate between Lincoln and Douglas, who, unlike modern politicians,
expressly addressed themselves to the rationality of their
audience. Even advertisements appealed to Reason until the late
1800s.

Beginning with the telegraph, continuing with the photography, and
culminating with the television, communication changed to be more
visual, and more importantly, without context. The telegraph
brought news without context. A picture is a slice of time and
and space, and may be an aberration rather than the norm.1 Television turned this into
an art form where disjoint images appear for no more than about three
seconds on average.

Postman’s argument is the essentially that the nature of television is
one that presents a sequence of images, not an argument, and therefore
can only be used to entertain. To illustrate this point he
observes news programs, which talk about a topic for about sixty
seconds and pause every ten minutes for a corporate propoganda
break. How can one take the news seriously, he argues, when they
are not even serious about it to not interrupt themselves? Similarly, he notes that Christine Craft, a news anchor in Kansas, was
fired “because research indicated that her appearance ‘hampered viewer
acceptance’” (p. 101). Appearance has nothing to do with the
veracity or importance of the news, but everything to do with show
business.

Thus, candidates for today’s public office do not appeal to the reason
of the electorate, but on presenting a favorable image and saying as
little actual information as possible. They have learned from
President Nixon’s well-known first presidential election loss due to
his undistinging television image. And this is perhaps the reason
Postman wrote this book: successful democracy is a rational
endeavor, and yet the medium of today’s society has destroyed that
rationalism, replacing it with a desired to be entertained. Hence
the ending with a Huxley’s danger that “they were laughing instead of
thinking, but ... they did not know what they were laughing about and
why they had stopped thinking.” (p. 163)

Amusing Ourselves to Death is a
cogent and caustic essay on the dangers of television to society, the
oft noted mind-numbing effect that it has. It presents a
well-argued case that the medium determines the means of communication
and is shocking harsh, calling news programs vaudeville and television
evangelists blasphemy. Postman draws an strong contrast between
the intellectualism of early America and its sad lack in today’s
society, yet he seems to unduly mourn for the Age of Typography that is
forever gone rather than finding ways to use the strengths of
images—their ability to evoke emotions—to offset the problems. Surely the poets mourned when the oral tradition died, yet society did
not wither away in the face of the shift to rationalism. Similarly, while our age may not have the intellectualism of a written
society, it has, perhaps undiscovered, strengths of its own. Since the Englightenment did not begin until about a century after the
invention of the printing press began the shift to a written society,
so our society is only beginning to adjust. In the final
analysis, it is an excellent work to raise awareness of the problem,
but ultimately leaves the solution for others to find.

Review: 9.7

Cogent and well thought out. It
puts words to impressions that I have had for many years. Backs
up his assertions well, even his caustic criticisms. A perfect
example of the Age of Typographic thinking that he mourns.

“I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why [God
prohibited graven images]. It is a strange injunction to include
as part of an ethical system unless
its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication
and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a
people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity
would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing
pictures... The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and
through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest
order of abstract thinking.” p. 9

“As Walter Ong points out, in oral cultures proverbs and sayings
are not occasional devices: ‘They are incessant. They form
the substance of thought itself. Thought in any extended form is
impossible without them, for it consists in them.’” p. 19

“Truth does not, and never has, come unadorned. It must
appear in its proper clothing or it is not acknowledged” p. 22. Socrates, for example asks not to be pre-condemned on the basis of his
ineloquence; “But to the people who invented it, the Sophists of
fifth-century B.C. Greece and their heirs, rhetoric was not merely and
opportunity for dramatic performance but a near indispensable means of
organizing evidence and proofs, and therefore of communicating truth.”
p. 22

“You may get a sense of what [effect the disconnection of the
context of information had on society] by asking yourself another
series of questions: What steps to you plan to take to reduce the
conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime,
and unemployment? ... You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some
plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once
every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a
satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you
hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of
the politically impotent.” p. 69

“The telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose
form had startling characteristics: its language was the language
of headlines—sensational, fragmented, impersonal.” p. 70

“Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of
propositions. ... But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out
of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the
point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make
them visible in a different way. In a world of photographic
images, Ms. Sontag writes, ‘all borders...seem arbitrary. Anything can be separated, can be made discontinuous, from anything
else: All that is necessary is to frame the subject
differently.’” p. 73

“When a television show is in process, it is very nearly
impermissible to say, ‘Let me think about that’ ... This type of
discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the
impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal
people in the act of thinking,
which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las
Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact
that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much
to see in it.” p. 90.

“The viewers also know that no matter how grave any fragment of
news may appear ... it will shortly be followed by a series of
commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in
fact render it largely banal. ... We have become so accustomed to
[television’s] discontinuities that we are no longer struck dumb [by
it].” p 104-5

“I should go so far as to say that ... a television news show is
a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that
abandons logic, reason, sequence, and rules of contradiction. In
aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In
the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.” p. 105

“‘The idea,’ [Robert MacNeil] writes, ‘is to keep everything
brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide
constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement.
... bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances
are dispensible, that qualifications impede the simple message, that
visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal
precision is an anachronism.’” p.105

“For God exists only in our minds, whereas Swaggart is there, to be seen, admired,
adored. Which is why he is the star of the show. And why
Billy Graham is a celebrity, and why Oral Roberts has his own
university, and why Robert Schuller has a crystal cathedral all to
himself. If I am not mistaken, the word for all this is
blasphemy.” p. 123

“We now know that ‘Sesame Street’ encourages children to love
school only if school is like ‘Sesame Street.’ Which is to say,
we now know that ‘Sesame Street’ undermines what the traditional idea
of schooling represents.” p. 141

1 An excellent example occured
shortly after reading this book. A friend of mine was learning to
water-ski and managed to stay on top of the water for about two seconds
in all of his trying, but a picture taken during those two seconds gave
the impression that he knew what he was doing.